California Ag Network

Tag: American Dairy Coalition

  • USMCA Review Puts Dairy Back in the Spotlight

    The Trump administration announced July 1 it will not renew USMCA in its current form, triggering the agreement’s annual review process while keeping all existing trade provisions—including dairy tariff-rate quotas and rules of origin—in force. The move does not disrupt current dairy trade but keeps long-standing issues, including Canada’s dairy market access, on the negotiating table.

    One week earlier, while speaking June 24 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) conference, Three Nations, One Table: North American Agriculture Under USMCA, Gregg Doud, President and CEO of the National Milk Producers Federation and former U.S. Chief Agricultural Negotiator under the first Trump administration, described dairy as one of North America’s most integrated industries.

    “I think one of the most fascinating conversations on integration is dairy between the U.S. and Canada. I mean, we have facilities on both sides of the border, very close to each other, and there’s stuff going back and forth all the time, which makes it really complicated to know what the real trade is,” Doud said.

    His observation reveals a challenge ahead. While the U.S. operates under a market-oriented milk pricing system built around Federal Orders that are benchmarks, not guarantees, and Canada relies on administered pricing through fat-based milk production quotas, dairy manufacturing has become increasingly integrated as it straddles the border with investments in the U.S. by Canadian-based companies, including at least one prominent Canadian-farmer-owned-cooperative company operating and expanding state-side.

    As negotiations move forward, policymakers will be weighing not only market ‘access,’ but also where value is created and where it lands in an “integrated” North American supply chain and what else is being integrated in terms of ‘sustainability’ definitions, metrics and data collection. In today’s ag and dairy economy, the question of what crosses the border is much more complicated than it was six years ago. — Story contributed by the American Dairy Coalition

  • ADC Flags Data Gaps, Farm-Data Control and Methane Metrics

    The American Dairy Coalition (ADC) is raising questions with the USDA regarding data its collected.

    At issue: a request by DMI and its Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy asks USDA to expand farm-level data collection for their environmental modeling, including greenhouse gas emissions — covering detailed feed rations by animal age and class, operational water use and re-use beyond irrigation, manure management systems and more — and to make it publicly available at state and county levels.

    ADC is asking authorities to slow down, warning in a recently-published brief that DMI’s Innovation Center has set Net Zero goals driven through the FARM ES program using methane metrics that remain unsettled.

    Meanwhile, as ADC points out in public comments filed April 9, existing USDA data already show gaps — like the growing spread between reported All-Milk prices and what farmers actually receive.

    At the same time, ADC points to farm-level data already being collected through supply chains, often as a practical condition of market access. This was confirmed in ADCs recent survey So the questions become:

    • What do “voluntary” and “aggregated” really mean?
    • Who owns a dairy farmer’s data?
    • Who controls how it is used?
    • And who captures the value it creates?

    “Farm data has value, and that value is being captured,” said Sherry Bunting, ADC Dairy Market Analysis & Policy Advisor. “Dairy farmers need to remain in control of how their proprietary business data is collected, used, shared, aggregated, and monetized. We are looking carefully at this issue, which has been raised by dairy farmers and confirmed in our recent producer survey.”

    Read more about the ADC’s flagging of data here.